Title
Financial Slack and Venture Managers' Decisions to Deek a New Alliance
Department/School
Entrepreneurship
Date of this version
7-2008
Document Type
Article
Keywords
Strategic alliance; Decision; Capabilities; Slack; Environment
Abstract
We examine two distinct perspectives to analyze the role of financial slack in the decisions of technology venture managers to seek strategic alliances. According to the capabilities perspective, financial slack provides managers with the ability to maximize the benefits from acquiring missing capabilities through alliance formation, whereas according to the resource dependence perspective, financial slack buffers the managers' motivations to seek alliances as a reaction to external environmental scarcity. Drawing on an experimental design and data on 1632 decisions nested within 51 managers, we find support for a combined perspective demonstrating that managerial discretion in the form of financial slack moderates how internal capabilities and context encourage managers to seek alliances. We discuss implications of our work for the alliance literature.
Volume
23
Issue
4
Published in
Journal of Business Venturing
Citation/Other Information
Journal of Business Venturing, vol. 23, issue 4, pp.465-481.